There’s No Place Like Home

For the big move, I bought the kids “Moving Journals”.  I’m not always the ‘let’s explore your feelings’ type of mom, but I thought the books would be a good way to actually let the kids explore their feelings.  I also thought it would be a good activity to keep the kids busy on our long plane ride:).

One entry that Robby made in his journal struck me; the prompt was “What I will miss the most“.  He wrote “I will miss my friends and teachers. I miss my piano.  Sometimes you can’t have it any more, but you get a new adventure”.  While he didn’t spell everything exactly like this, but this is what he told me it said:). Sometimes kids are so insightful — and I never knew he even liked taking piano! The things you learn when kids start telling you their feelings.

I thought about this entry as we had the opportunity to take two trips over the last month.  And, both trips reminded us of how good it can feel to be home.

First, in March,  we headed to Hong Kong for a long weekend.  Hong Kong is less than 2 hours by train from Guangzhou – but it seemed like a world away.  Hong Kong is a territory of China but it has a high degree of autonomy from the mainland.  It has its own currency, economic system and we even had to pass through customs.  The city is quite diverse, with about 7% of the population being non-Chinese vs. .04% in mainland China.  We could feel that difference right away.

There were two things, however, that made Hong Kong an instant hit.  First, English is one of the official languages. Until we arrived in Hong Kong, I think we underestimated how comforting it feels to be able to communicate with everyone we meet, or to overhear and understand a conversation, or even just to be able to comply with a loudspeaker announcement on the subway without having to take cues from other passengers.  I recently read Trevor Noah’s autobiography where he makes this very point -language is the ultimate unifier – and this was so evident during our time in Hong Kong.  (A side-note plug for Trevor Noah’s book, “Born a Crime” I loved it).

The second thing that made us giddy?  A&M Market.  This store is on an upper floor in what seemed like an office building.  Don’t let the location fool you – once inside it’s an American’s wildest dream.  There were about 20 aisles of items all shipped from the US. We stocked up on so many things we didn’t need and paid way too much for our haul – but those Cheez-It crackers, the Pam cooking spray and Fiber One granola bars made us feel like we brought a little bit of home back to Guangzhou.

Our second trip in the past month came during the kids’ spring break.  While Rob took a trip back to the US, the kids and I headed up to Chengdu in the Sichuan province, north of Guangzhou, for a little bit of sight-seeing.  We experienced so many new and different things during our 5-day adventure.  We saw the famous Chinese pandas at the Panda Nature Reserve, tasted authentic Sichuan food, visited the LeShan Buddha – the largest seated Buddha in the world – and we climbed Qingcheng mountain – a beautiful mountain with Taoist temples built throughout and the setting inspiration for Kung Fu Panda!  We learned so much about Buddhism and Taoism, religions that were foreign to us before the trip.    The absolute highlight of our trip to Chengdu was seeing the famous mask-changing opera.  We still can’t figure out how the performers changed their masks right in front of our eyes!

We spent 5 days living it up in Chengdu; but even after we splurged on room service and swam our hearts out in the hotel pool, we were ready to come home.  One day, Rachel looked at me and acknowledged it was time to go home – it’s so funny she said – we were ready to come back home, to Guangzhou.

So while we do miss our family and friends, – we are having a fabulous adventure like Robby predicted – and are making Guangzhou home.

PS – I’ve loaded a ton of pictures from our trip, check them out!